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Saturday, 21 August 2010

I've been away in Australia for most of this week. But before I went, I wrote a "Letter from Elsewhere" for Scoop about the report of the Welfare Working Group.

Did you know, for example, that the report takes care to quote New Zealand's largest provider of casual labour criticising the minimum wage, the absence of youth rates and the personal grievance procedures? Or that it repeats the statistic about 170,000 people of working age being on a benefit for five years or more no less than six times? Despite also noting, in passing, that New Zealand already has the highest rate of workforce participation in the OECD?

You can read the whole piece here. It ties in with Maia's and Julie's posts last Tuesday.

registration in advance, $50 (students $30). Rebstock is one of the speakers. I don't know who the others are, except Sue Bradford will be on a panel, along with Ian Shirley (I think he has been pretty critical of the WWG report).